


how big, how blue, how beautiful

by espressohno



Series: betazoid bones au [4]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Betazoid, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, M/M, Telepathic Bond, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:08:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28936779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressohno/pseuds/espressohno
Summary: a good amount of time has passed since Leonard had to come to terms with who he is, how he feels about it, and how he feels about Spock. the two of them have made a life together, built around the strength of the telepathic bond between themwhat happens when, one day, an accident on the Enterprise takes that bond away?(another betazoid bones installment, with a lot of angst)
Relationships: Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock
Series: betazoid bones au [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1490939
Comments: 50
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

Leonard woke up in Spock’s quarters, where it was so warm that it felt like the air itself wrapped around him in layers. This was how he slept now. 

He used to be a firm believer in sleeping in a cold room, underneath as many blankets as possible, with wool socks on. That was before he met Spock, before he became friends with Spock and started spending evenings in his quarters drinking fruity wine, before they ended up in bed together and Leonard informally moved in. Before their trip to New Vulcan, a few months ago, on a week-long shore leave, where they slept in a huge bed surrounded by three open windows, where the warm wind blew in and out and over Leonard’s skin in a way that easily felt ten times better than a pile of blankets in a cold room. Yeah, after that trip, he’d officially been converted to the heat. 

It helped that Spock was a part of that package deal. He slept in loose pajamas, made of the same thin, soft fabric as the single sheet that covered his bed. This morning he was already up, but hadn’t changed yet. Leonard sat up in bed and saw him through the doorway of the bedroom, meditating on his yoga mat. He looked to the side and saw a mug of coffee sitting there. 

He had a good life. 

Spock had been meditating for long enough that he’d reached that single sensation of peace, small and gentle like a candle flame, and Leonard could always feel it when he reached this point. He didn’t press for more, and Spock wasn’t projecting, it just seeped into the atmosphere of the room. This was part of his routine, too, when he slept in Spock’s quarters. Meditating by proxy. 

He drank his coffee and just sat up in bed for a little while, and then got up and went through the rest of his routine before work, which was about the same as his routine in his own quarters (with the added activity of stepping around Spock on his yoga mat). 

-

Jim ran into them in the corridor on the way to the bridge, and seeing him in the morning was always something like seeing the sun come out. Not just the golden hair and golden uniform, but light just spilled out of him when he was in a good mood, when he smiled and when he talked. 

“My two favorite people in the galaxy,” he said by way of greeting. 

Spock nodded his head. “Good morning, Jim.”

“You know that line’s gonna cause trouble for you if you ever find a partner.”

Jim stuck his tongue out at him and the three of them made off towards the mess. Leonard listened to him and Spock talk about their course for that morning, felt the sensation, in the air, of the two of them in the same room, and that energy that surrounded them meeting and mixing together. People didn’t believe Leonard, when he said it, but Spock always got a burst of energy when he interacted with Jim. He basked in it through breakfast, too, felt everyone coming in and out of the mess slowly wake up. Years ago he always thought it was just a weird quirk, an unfortunately high dose of empathy in his body, that he felt what other people felt. In the mornings he’d soak in the emotions of everyone around him and already start to lose energy himself, like a constant battle against the psionic sense he didn’t know he was using. But that was a long time ago. 

It took a long time, a lot of hard days and arguments with Spock and awkward conversations and a few months in counseling, but now this was just who he was. He hardly had to think about it. 

Leonard watched the two of them get in the turbolift after breakfast, saw the doors close up around their thoughts and carry them up and away, and went to work, and didn’t even have to focus on shielding his psionic sense for the day ahead of him. He just did. 

-

If Leonard had been on the bridge, he would have seen what happened to the ship in real time. Would have heard the discussion on whether they have enough time to change course, on what exactly was in front of them, and around them, that their sensors hadn’t been able to pick up on. They probably called it  _ a singularity in the quantum field _ or whatever, which was code for  _ we have no clue what the fuck we just drove through. _

He didn’t go up to the bridge that afternoon. So he didn’t witness it, whatever it was. 

Instead he was in Sickbay, standing over someone’s biobed, when all of a sudden it felt like the entire ship hit a bump in the road, and then he almost collapsed. 

Leonard knew what a migraine felt like. Until he learned to control his psionic senses better, and before then, when his method of coping was just to avoid large groups of people, he used to get them all the time. All of his childhood doctors were stumped. They could only recommend how to manage the pain once it happened, not how to prevent them. 

But this wasn’t a migraine. It was way, way worse. 

He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to remember about managing pain. It was hard enough to stay on his feet when it felt like his entire head was exploding, pressing relentlessly against the inside of his skull. He might have been screaming, he didn’t know. His hearing was obstructed by everyone’s thoughts coursing through his brain at once, choppy and all mixed up. He could hear their voices like they were speaking right into his ear, louder than he’d ever been able to hear people’s thoughts. 

_ \--what just-- _

_ \--my leg is-- _

_ \--Doctor-- _

_ \--is he?-- _

_ \--wrong-- _

_ \--Doctor McCoy-- _

_ \--what’s wrong--what’s wrong--what’s wrong-- _

The last words were coming from Christine, he could recognize her voice, and distantly he wondered if she was saying that out loud. Her mouth was moving, in front of his face. He tried to latch onto the sight of her in front of him, as an anchor point. He was getting dizzy. 

_ Hold on to me. _

He was able to grasp onto the full sentence, watching her lips move, and he knew it was her who said it, but the effort it took to distinguish her thoughts only made him more sick. He felt like he was tumbling down a hill, like he’d been thrown into the washer with a load of laundry. He kept watching Christine’s face. 

_ Everybody back off! Get as far away from him as you can! _

She was shouting now. It echoed inside his head. It hurt. 

_ I’m sorry, I’m sorry. _

And suddenly Leonard was in his office, and Christine must have helped him get there, and that was why he felt like he was falling or tumbling or spinning, and why the next time he was able to notice his surroundings he was in the dark, and it was quieter. There were four walls around him, and they didn’t keep the voices out but they dulled them, just a little, and Leonard could nearly think for himself. 

Christine was kneeling in front of him. Leonard felt her worry so clearly in his own mind that he got scared. Her face didn’t look worried, though, not in the way other people’s did. But he could feel it. He could feel it like he’d never worked to train his senses, like he used to feel people’s emotions. It crashed into him again and again, like a wave, in a frightening blue the color of the deepest part of the ocean. Leonard would get lost, if she stayed here. 

_ Go _ , he said--at least he hoped he said it out loud--and he wished he had the power to explain, but he didn’t. He couldn’t say anything else. He needed to be alone. 

_ Go, please--go, please leave-- _ he tried again, worried the words weren’t coming out. They sounded the same to him as the thoughts coming through the wall, and all of them drowned in the depth of Christine’s fear. 

She left. Leonard pushed himself backwards with his hands, to the farthest corner of his office, like the extra bit of distance could get everyone out of his head. 

He’d been here before, too. Hiding in closets, in dark corners, wrapping his arms around himself to take up as little space as possible, to keep his body in one piece when it felt like he might be torn apart any second. He knew how to do this. He’d done it thousands of times. 

The problem was that even back then, it never actually worked. 

-

He must have spent hours there. Or days. Even alone in his office, closed in on all sides, he heard them. He felt them. The crew. He felt their footsteps through the corridors, heard their conversations, their thoughts, their laughter. Everything was already mixed up by the time it came to him, nothing was in the right place, but everything was there. Everyone. The only emotion he felt which he identified as his own was horror, ice cold and paralyzing, when he realized that he could feel Jim, all the way up on the bridge. He heard his own voice, his own thoughts, only once.

_ What’s happening to me? _

-

The door to his office opened and Leonard flinched, pressed himself into the wall, prepared to drown, again, in another person’s fear, like he had in Christine’s. He already had enough of his own, and the longer he’d sat there the more he could feel a trail of it, all the way from the bridge. A contagion. Every person who heard the news about their CMO having a breakdown in his office, he could feel them lighting up one by one, like they were on a radar. 

But nothing filled the room, when the doors closed again. Leonard opened his eyes and searched in the dark, and it was Spock. 

He said nothing. He was shielding. It was like nobody had entered the room at all, except that he was coming closer. 

He sat down, ankles crossed, on the floor in front of Leonard. It was hard to filter anything out, to rein in his mind to focus on what was right in front of him, on only Spock and not the hundreds of others on the ship. And Spock didn’t look afraid, but maybe he was, inside his head. For a moment he just watched Leonard, and then he reached forward and placed his hand on the back of Leonard’s neck, on the skin above the line of his uniform. 

Leonard took his first deep breath for what must have been hours. 

“Thirty minutes, ashayam,” Spock corrected, and it almost made him want to cry, from gratitude, that Spock didn’t say that inside his head, but out loud. 

His head was clearing again, for now, with Spock’s help. Only now did he realize how tense his body had been. He focused on that, on relaxing every one of his muscles, on breathing. As long as Spock was there with his hand on the back of his neck and the strength of his own mind keeping everything out, he didn’t have to do anything else. 

He gradually released the hold he’d had on himself, sat up a little straighter and loosened his legs to sit with his ankles crossed, like Spock. Knees to knees. Spock leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together, too, and he must have been projecting, along with helping to keep Leonard’s shields up. All Leonard could feel now was Spock’s presence, his mind a calming, colorless void, and the own pounding of his headache. 

Once he felt like he could, Leonard whispered, “What happened?”

“We don’t know,” Spock said. “Whatever we passed through thirty minutes ago has only had an effect on you. Our sensors categorized it as an unidentified disturbance.”

Leonard sighed. He was so tired already. 

“You’ll have to do experiments on me, huh.”

“Not now, not if you do not feel ready for it. Or not at all, if you wish.”

“This’ll go away,” Leonard told himself, “they always go away.”

“Do they?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is unlike the migraines you typically experience,” he said, and Leonard realized that of course, Spock was inside his head, which meant he was feeling Leonard’s pain, too. Although at this point he could hardly complain about it. Simple, quiet pain was better than the hundreds of voices. 

“They’re creating a psi-null chamber, around one of the biobeds. Once it is finished, you can rest there.”

“My own personal fish tank.” Leonard didn’t bother holding back how he felt about being put in a Betazoid enclosure in the middle of Sickbay, for everyone to stand around and scan him and speculate about what was wrong with him this time. Honestly, this was high on his list of worst case scenarios. 

“I know,” Spock said. “It will only be temporary, ashayam, until your pain subsides.”

Leonard took another deep breath. 

“I will stay here with you until you are ready.”

“Thank you,” Leonard whispered, and closed his eyes. 

-

To everyone’s credit, the psi-null chamber, which Leonard continued to call his fish tank once he woke up and saw the shiny, clear walls surrounding his biobed on all sides, was pretty damn good. It kept everyone, and everything, out. Leonard got a hypo to dull his migraine and he slept like the dead. 

And then he woke up the next morning, saw half of his medical staff and a handful of science officers staring at him through the walls like he was a damn zoo animal, and he turned over and willed himself to go back to sleep. 

-

He let himself be scanned and tested that afternoon, although he wasn’t happy about it. Christine came in with a science officer and they did the whole round, and found nothing. Leonard felt confusion coming off of them both, still fractured and mixed-up like before, and despair from Christine in that same worry-deep blue. Even though she didn’t say it out loud, he could feel that she was sorry. 

Their emotions were weaker than normal, too, and obviously just a shadow of what they were when his migraine first hit, but Leonard was exhausted. Maybe everything about him felt weak that day. 

“It’s not your fault, you know,” he said to Christine. He didn’t bother to wait for privacy. The science officer, Lieutenant Lightfoot, was right on the other side of the biobed looking over Leonard’s vitals. Outside the walls of his fish tank, everyone was pretending not to stare. 

Christine shook her head. She looked put together, always, and she held her head high and she kept her emotions level, even when Leonard could feel the facade crumbling at the edges. Even now, after what she must have witnessed, she looked steady. She gave him another hypo for his head.

“I watched it happen, and I couldn’t help you.”

“You did the best that you could. That was quick thinking, to isolate me.”

“Quit trying to comfort me,” she finally snapped, and Leonard watched her frustration with fondness. He’d rubbed off on her way too much, and it showed in times like this. “You can worry about me when you’re feeling better.”

And with that, she placed her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and then left. There was a moment when the door opened that Leonard heard the distant chatter of everyone’s thoughts and feelings and words from outside, and then the door shut and it was just him and Lightfoot, eternally stumped. 

“I’m gonna be honest,” she said, “I have no clue what happened.”

“That makes two of us.”

She let out a defeated sort of laugh, and picked up her PADD. “I’ll take the brain scans to my lab and look at them closer.”

“Take your time. Oh, and on your way out, please tell the folks in the peanut gallery to quit lookin at me like I’m patient zero.”

She laughed, more genuine this time, and Leonard let himself float on the sensation of her amusement circling around in the little room. And then she opened the door and left. 

-

Jim and Spock were the next people to show up at his bedside, but Leonard was in a better mood, by then, and his head didn’t really hurt so much,  _ and _ they brought a tray of food from the mess with them. It was his second day in his Betazoid-patient-zero-fish-tank-enclosure, but he ignored all the glances in his direction from the rest of Sickbay. He sat up in bed and ate lunch with Spock and Jim on either side of him. 

Spock’s hand rested on the surface of his biobed, fingertips subtly reaching for him, even though Leonard’s closest body part, his thigh, was covered with a sheet. He kept Leonard locked in his gaze with his dark, intense eyes. Leonard could see that he was tired. And Jim, on the other side, was covering up how worried he was with a mask of humor and nonchalance. Leonard didn’t have to be half Betazoid to see that. He could tell even without feeling it. 

That was probably why Spock was so tired. He must have been sitting there and shielding Jim’s emotions for him. 

The three of them talked about how he was doing, only briefly, because Leonard didn’t have any mind-blowing updates, or anything they hadn’t already heard from Christine. For the time being he was putting up with being in the psi-null chamber. It was still better than the alternative; there was nowhere else on the ship where he would be shielded this well until they figured out what had made his psionic senses go haywire.

“Speaking of which, please tell me you’ve figured something out.”

Jim’s easy smile fell a little bit. That was enough of an answer. 

“The answer still eludes us,” Spock admitted. “As does the solution.”

“He was up half the night in the labs.” Jim tilted his head in Spock’s direction, and crossed his arms over his chest, protecting himself by playing pretend. Poorly. What tried to be more nonchalance just came off as frustration. “In case you were worried no one’s reanalyzed your test results for the tenth time yet.”

“New conclusions could be drawn from the same data, Jim.”

“But they’re not being drawn. All we have is a disturbance and a brain scan. Everything else is a big fat blank.”

“If you heeded my advice and returned to the location of the disturbance, we could have conducted further study.”

“I’m not going back there. You want to put Bones through that again?”

Spock bristled a little bit. “I would never intentionally put Leonard in pain for the purpose of collecting data,” he said. Spit out, more like, but if Leonard didn’t know him so well at this point his tone of voice would have just come out as flat, not annoyed. But he was annoyed. 

It was so bizarre to witness Jim and Spock arguing in front of him,  _ about  _ him, that Leonard didn’t think to stop it at first. Finally he cut in.

“Both of you calm down. I’m not getting any worse. Chances are my headache’s gonna pass and then we can study what happened for as long as it takes to figure it out.”

Both of them looked away from each other, and from Leonard, like he’d physically separated them from a schoolyard fight. Jim’s arms were still crossed over his chest, but when he looked down at the floor he just seemed defeated. 

“And Spock, you can stop shielding. I’m really doing fine right now. I can handle two people in the room with me.”

Spock turned back to look at him with wide eyes. There was a moment when Leonard didn’t understand, when it seemed like maybe the shocked expression on his face was disbelief. Maybe he didn’t trust that Leonard could handle it. Or maybe he was still thinking about all the unknowns. 

Spock stared at him, for a few seconds more, and Leonard realized what the look on his face meant before he even said it out loud. He realized it without reading it off of Spock, because he couldn’t. 

“I was not shielding, Leonard.”


	2. Chapter 2

Leonard was discharged from Sickbay just hours later. They still knew nothing about his condition, about what had happened, and about whether or not he would go back to normal, but he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get the hell out of there. He agreed to come back the next day even though he knew it wouldn’t be to work. 

He went to Spock’s quarters. Spock wasn’t there, but that was where his feet took him out of habit. He tried to replicate dinner, and look through the Federation’s scientific archive to see if there was anything helpful, but everything just made him feel restless. His brain still felt fried. Eventually he gave up, threw his PADD to the other side of the couch, rubbed his eyes, and thought about sleep. 

Yeah, sleep was probably a good idea, even though it was all he’d been doing in Sickbay for the last three days. 

Spock didn’t come back until later in the evening, when Leonard had already been dozing in and out for a while, fully dressed on top of the covers. He woke up to the sound of the doors opening and closing and pushed himself up against the headboard. 

“Leonard,” Spock said from the doorway. He might have been surprised to see him there, but Leonard couldn’t tell from this far away. 

“Surprised to see me?”

Spock crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed next to him. 

“How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Leonard said, and he really was, for now. “It just feels weird to have my senses dulled like this. Like when you get sick and your nose gets all blocked up.”

Spock studied him for a moment. Normally, and especially up close, Leonard would be able to feel what was going on in Spock’s head unless he was shielding. He probably wasn’t, right now, and testing Leonard’s senses to see if they were really gone. If they were there, Leonard knew, he would have been able to feel Spock’s gentle curiosity, aimed at him like a little flashlight. The thought made him smile, despite himself. What he really wanted, after all the shit he’d been through in Sickbay, was to be back here, with Spock. Whether his sense was blocked or dulled or what, he couldn’t deny how good that felt. 

“You can sense nothing?”

“Are you projecting at me, right now?”

“No. I can try, if you wish.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “tell me something good.”

They sat there in silence for a few seconds, and then--it was faint, but Leonard could feel it. He almost sighed in relief that he could feel it. Just the smallest nudge, into his mind, from Spock. A question. It made him think of the old space station that used to orbit the Earth and send out transmissions every day, in every language, that said  _ hello, is somebody out there? _

“You can feel it,” Spock confirmed, and Leonard nodded. 

Funny enough, it was Spock whose relief overtook him, and he reached forward for Leonard’s wrist, like he was catching him before he could float away. When their skin was touching the connection was stronger, still. Leonard felt Spock’s relief curling like smoke in the back of his mind. 

“It’s still pretty weak.”

“We can only hope that it will be temporary.”

Leonard nodded again, and placed his free hand on top of Spock’s, where it held his wrist. He felt it a little bit more, the bridge between their minds, and then it fizzled out. He moved his hand away and rubbed his eyes. “It’s like having a car that won’t start.”

“I believe I should have started an archive, a long time ago, of your metaphors for your psionic senses.”

Spock had made this joke before. Usually Leonard could feel it coming, could feel the buildup in the air between them and his own little self-satisfied amusement, almost as if he was smiling around the words. Now their quarters felt way too quiet, even with their voices. There was something missing. He still opened his eyes again and smiled at Spock, and focused on that one point of physical connection, reaching out to feel, not just hear, that joke he always made. 

He found only a tiny bit of amusement. And something else. 

“You’re worried.”

“I am afraid, Leonard,” Spock said plainly. 

He couldn’t help it, he just sat there and stared at him, at his face, while he talked. It had been a long time since he believed Spock didn’t feel anything behind his always-blank expressions. He knew, now, that he always felt something. But sitting right next to him, touching him, and feeling only this small echo of his mind. Leonard would be more upset if he wasn’t busy wrapping his head around how  _ weird _ it all was. 

“Your psionic sense...is a part of who you are.”

“It’s a part of who  _ we _ are,” Leonard added. 

Spock nodded. Regardless of what Leonard could feel from his mind, he was visibly upset, by his standards. His eyes were wide and he was taking deeper, longer breaths than normal, which was what he did when he needed to stay calm. Leonard wanted to say  _ it’s okay _ , but he didn’t know. 

“Right now,” he said instead, and reached for the back of Spock’s neck. The extra touch, closer to his meld-points, helped. “I can still feel something. Can we just focus on that?”

Spock didn’t answer, he just leaned forward until their foreheads touched, like they did back when Leonard was falling apart in his office days ago. The presence of Spock’s mind was the strongest, then, and it made Leonard’s nearly gasp on his next inhale. Spock was there,  _ really _ there. Leonard could feel every moment of his realization that their link was increasing, and it ended in relief, satisfaction, and something deeper, something affectionate, like standing at the window and seeing your lover come home. 

_ A very meaningful image _ , said Spock’s voice in his mind. 

_ Oh, leave me alone. It makes sense to me.  _

He was still holding the back of Spock’s neck, feeling every point where his fingertips pressed against the warmth of his skin, and he urged him forward just a little bit more until it brought their mouths together. 

It was like learning to do things all over again, that night. With their mental link coming in and out, stronger from some touches than others. If anything they were more desperate to find that link, at its strongest point, than they were to please each other. 

But after what Leonard had been through in the last few days, even just in the last hours, wondering if he’d lost his sense forever, he couldn’t get enough. Every time the sensation weakened it just made him reach for more, pull their bodies and minds closer together until it came back. Every time it did, when their link felt stable and their minds were close enough that they could project their thoughts to each other, it felt like the first time again. 

Feeling the touch of their skin, Spock’s hands and arms and legs around him, their foreheads pressed together--it was so warm, everywhere, even in the air, and it almost seemed like it could be enough to bring Leonard’s mind back. And there were moments, like hearing him gasp when Leonard pressed into him, feeling the rush of their pleasure mixed together, resting his head against the side of Spock’s neck and breathing in the familiar scent of his skin, that felt exactly like they always did, like nothing had changed at all. It made him dizzy. They went to sleep still tangled together and Leonard thought that maybe things were going to be okay. He’d make sure they were okay. 

-

Leonard woke up the next morning, and his first thought was that Spock had left. The room was so quiet it scared him, and he understood why horror movies always got really quiet before something popped out in front of the camera. 

He really hoped he’d get his senses back before he had to go through the trouble of getting used to this. 

He stared at the ceiling, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Spock could still be here, meditating. With Leonard’s weakened sense he probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy the way Spock’s meditation spread through the rest of their quarters. He wouldn’t leave, though. Not that he was the best at social cues and gestures, but he was getting better, and Leonard was pretty sure he wouldn’t  _ leave _ after last night. He almost wanted to laugh at his own thoughts, as soon as that one came into his head. This was why they weren’t supposed to be front and center in his brain, it was better when other people took up space in there and pushed his own to the background. Because things were getting weird already. 

He wanted to groan, and suppressed that too. In the end he gave up, and rubbed his eyes again and dragged his hand down his face and took a deep breath. He was going to get out of bed, get some breakfast, and start another day of figuring out what was going on with his head. 

Leonard shifted, to sit up, and his stomach dropped. He hadn’t even noticed. 

The entire time, Spock had been in bed with him, sleeping. Leonard’s first thought was affectionate. He was glad to see Spock sleep in after he’d reportedly been up for days in the labs. But it was quickly overshadowed again by the fact that Spock had not only been right next to him, but their legs had been hooked together, and Leonard had spent the last few minutes under the impression that Spock wasn’t even in their quarters at  _ all _ . 

He should have told Spock, should have shook him awake and told him that it was completely, totally gone, that even touching him did nothing, but he didn’t. He was frozen. 

Spock had been so afraid last night that he’d said it  _ out loud _ . And now the very thing that Spock feared had happened. 

Leonard got dressed with hands that shook a little bit. He could feel the weight of everything building, like a wave, and just hoped that it wouldn’t crash into him until he’d slipped out into the corridor. He’d go to Jim first. No--maybe Christine. Or Lightfoot, if she was awake yet. Maybe all of them were still asleep, finally resting under the impression that Leonard was getting better, not worse.

The only apology he could think to give Spock, for slipping out on him, for losing his psionic sense and forgetting he was there, for putting their entire relationship in jeopardy from this day forward, was a mug of jasmine tea on the bedside table next to him. An apology that wouldn’t wake him. He looked down at Spock, still asleep with one hand resting over his torso and his head tilted to the side, his hair fanning out across the pillow. More than anything he wanted to move closer to him, to get back into bed with his partner who never slept this long, to treat it like the special occasion--the reunion--it was. He watched Spock sleep for a second longer. As soon as he woke up he’d have to find out what had changed overnight, what was taken from them. 

Leonard couldn’t stay. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to the side of Spock’s temple instead, hoping, still, that he’d feel even the faintest outline of their mental link right in that spot. 

There was nothing. He could have been touching anything. A piece of furniture. He felt nothing at all. 

This time, Leonard ran out of their quarters. He caught himself against the wall in the corridor with both hands while that wave crashed through him, all of the implications of what he’d just experienced in the bedroom with Spock, the concept of  _ forever _ , everyone’s voices from the last few days saying  _ we don’t know _ . He slid down the back of the wall, like he always used to when there were too many people in his head, but it was just him now. 

He stretched out his legs across the floor and tried to take deeper breaths. 

He’d always wished for this, hadn’t he? Well, maybe not for a year or two, but it used to be almost every day that he wished he could feel like this. 

Or, at least, he tried to give that line of thinking a shot while he sat there on the floor of the corridor. Until, 

“Bones? Did you sleep there, or something?”

Jim looked more amused than worried, and looking up at him felt like seeing him through a screen. Like looking at a photograph. There was just….less of him. Less of the moment. 

No, he didn’t want to feel like this. 

“Just came here to think.”

“Well, weirdo, do you want to think in an actual chair,” Jim asked, “like, in the mess with me.”

Leonard sighed on his next exhale, and rolled his eyes for good measure, said, “Fine.” And it actually made Jim grin to see him push himself up to his feet and follow after him towards the mess. Jim was still the easiest man to read, and would probably always be the easiest to read. If Leonard had to get used to this, he could start there. 

At least, that was the next thing he told himself. It was punishing. Bones walked through the corridor next to Jim and thought about that myth of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill, the way every one of his thoughts was leading into the next, uninterrupted. This new version of his mind was like an echochamber. He took up too much space in there, and at the same time, felt completely alone.

-

It wasn’t like he’d spent the morning hiding. He knew Spock was going to come and find him eventually. He just felt better that it would be outside of his quarters, outside of the bed where hours ago they still had a mental link that they wouldn’t have anymore. 

But he still felt a little pang of fear, and guilt, when he saw Spock walking into the lab. Leonard had half a dozen science officers surrounding him, had wires hooked up to his forehead and his forearms. He felt cold, too. His uniform shirt was off after they’d done a test with a blood pressure monitor on him. They were trying to make it look like they weren’t grasping at straws, but it was obvious as soon as that blood pressure monitor came out. What made it worse was that Leonard actually did feel fine, outside of his blocked sense. He wasn’t in any pain. He almost wished one of their tests or monitors or experiments would hurt, because then they’d have something to focus on. 

By the time Spock made it, Leonard was in full scientific-guinea-pig mode. Covered in wires, surrounded by scientists. He tried to smile at him but it definitely came off as sarcastic. 

“Commander,” Lightfoot said, from the station behind all the action. “I thought you were going back to the bridge after yesterday.”

Spock nodded in her direction, but he didn’t look away from Leonard. “I am. I came only to check on Doctor McCoy, for a moment.”

Everyone dispersed within seconds, returned to their science stations to analyze data, and left the two of them alone in the corner of the room. They knew the real reason Spock had come to see him. Back when the word about their relationship had first started traveling around the ship, Leonard remembered being bothered, but now he was weirdly grateful. 

Spock stood in front of Leonard with his hands clasped behind his back, and lowered his voice. 

“Are you well?”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. It didn’t sound very convincing, especially paired with all of the wires hooked up to his body, monitoring his completely normal and insignificant vitals and brainwaves. “They aren’t finding anything, but I feel fine.”

Spock nodded. He didn’t look at all comforted by this answer, but that was another thing only Leonard would be able to distinguish from all of his other facial expressions. Right now he still looked nervous, but it was only a shadow of what Leonard had seen yesterday afternoon. 

“I’m still half Betazoid, according to my genes.”

“I cannot imagine how a disturbance in space could have altered your genetics.”

Leonard shrugged, and tried to make some sort of casual smile, and tried to look _ at all casual _ about this. If he was doing a good enough job, and if Spock  _ really  _ couldn’t access the link between their minds, maybe he’d be able to get away with it. “Me neither, but we still tested for it.”

“Your psionic sense…” Spock started. 

He just shook his head. The best he could offer was, 

“Maybe it’s just temporary.”

Spock nodded, again. Leonard felt like he was having to deliver the same bad news over and over again, every time he opened his mouth. 

There was a moment, then, when Spock was looking at him with this softness in his eyes that Leonard couldn’t seem to figure out, because he didn’t know what was going on inside of his head anymore, and maybe it was affectionate but maybe it wasn’t. The two of them had been passing these claims back and forth about Leonard getting better, getting his senses back and being himself again, ideas that they had no evidence for at all. For the first time Leonard could see how fragile they were. He looked into Spock’s unreadable expression, and somewhere in his chest, behind his heart and against the back of his ribcage, a single question settled into his bones like it was coating them with ice, and he felt goosebumps spread out across his whole body. 

_ What if, _ the question asked, and it was worse inside his mind, privately terrorizing him while Spock watched,  _ we won’t be able to get over this? _

Leonard swallowed hard.

“Very well,” Spock said, louder this time, “I will leave you to conduct further research.”

Leonard formed his mouth around the word  _ bye _ , because no sound would come out. 

-

They found nothing, in the end. Leonard spent three days being tested in the lab and they ended up in the same place, and at that point he decided to cut his losses and go back to work. He told Lieutenant Lightfoot to try to get into contact with the Institute of Medical Science on Betazed, but even that idea didn’t give him much hope. What he needed to do was try to move on, to stop telling himself that it would be temporary and learn how to be okay without it. 

So he went back to work. That was the easiest thing to get used to, once people stopped looking at him like they were waiting for his invisible problem to become visible, for his eyes to change color or for him to collapse from another migraine. Eventually (and with a somewhat gentle reminder from their CMO) they all remembered that they actually have work to do. 

Leonard’s psionic senses had played a part in his job, of course, but he still had all of the same training and experience without them. Some days he even started to forget that there was something missing. He’d get focused on someone’s injury, running tests and making a diagnosis and putting together treatment, and in the back of his mind he’d think to himself  _ wow, I’m shielding really well today, I can’t even feel that I’m doing it _ , and then remember, and laugh at himself, and find something to do before his next thought went down a darker path. 

It was everything outside of Sickbay that was difficult. That was when he walked through the corridors or stood in the rec deck or on the bridge and felt like he was in the wrong body. Being around people just wasn’t the same. Everything was too quiet, when he didn’t know what everyone was feeling. He couldn’t tell if they were happy, if they were feeling okay, if anyone needed help. Even if they were smiling when they talked to him, if someone was laughing, they all just looked like they were on a holovid to him. 

And Spock, well…

For the first few days Leonard became convinced that Spock was deliberately hiding his feelings from him, that he had to be upset underneath it all, even though nothing showed on his face. It wasn’t until the end of the first full week, since he’d lost his psionic sense, that he laid in bed wide awake next to Spock and remembered that it used to always be like this. Spock wasn’t hiding, he was acting the same as he always did--Leonard was the one who was different. He couldn’t read him anymore, couldn’t check in on him, couldn’t feel what he was feeling. All of that had become so second nature that he forgot how much of their connection was built on the link between their minds. 

Now he was lying in bed next to Spock after spending days thinking he was being evasive, and the two of them had hardly spoken any words to each other, tonight, and they definitely hadn’t touched each other, and it was all because Leonard had lost access to that mental link which was basically the foundation of their entire relationship. 

He felt like an idiot. And if Spock knew what was going on in his head he would have put a stop to it, would have corrected Leonard and told him that none of it was his fault, but he didn’t know what Leonard was thinking, and he didn’t say any of those things. He was asleep. And Leonard was next to him, completely alone inside his mind. He tried letting himself be angry at Spock, but that only made him feel even worse. 

Eventually, he fell asleep, knowing he’d have to go through all of this again the next day. Talking to Spock like he was delivering bad news. Watching his friends live out their lives on the other side of some invisible barrier. Feeling alone. All of it would be waiting for him the next morning. And the next. And maybe for the rest of his life. 


	3. Chapter 3

“Dad, dad, dad,” Joanna said on their next call, in lieu of  _ hello _ . He could hear that she was practically buzzing with energy. “Guess what.”

Talking to Joanna was the first thing that made him feel normal, and happy. He was used to this. Used to not being able to read his daughter’s feelings from so far away. He knew what to expect, and he got exactly that, and he got to be just  _ dad _ instead of  _ the Enterprise’s half-Betazoid CMO who lost his psionic sense and nobody can figure out why _ . Word had gotten around, now, and rooms got even quieter when he entered them. 

But tonight he could forget about all that. 

“What,” he asked, “What’s got you bouncin off the walls?”

“I projected today. Like a full sentence. When I transferred last semester and they did all of those tests they told me I’d probably never be able to do that.”

“And you did it?” Leonard felt his entire body warming up, blooming with pride. He wished he could see her face right now as she was telling him this. 

“I did!”

“Of course you did,” he said. He smiled to himself. “That’s my girl.”

It was silent on the other side of the line for a second. She was probably grinning, too. That big, goofy looking grin that Leonard hoped she’d never grow out of. 

“Wait, now what kind of a school tells you you’ll never be able to do something? I thought your mom vetted this place.”

“I’m only a quarter Betazoid,  _ dad _ , they were just being realistic. And anyway, they probably won’t be underestimating me anymore. Ha ha!”

“Oh, I’m sure they won’t.”

“The school counselor--he’s the only Betazoid--he said I must have really strong genes. He wanted to know what my lineage is.”

“Tell him that information is classified by the government. Closed adoption.”

“You really don’t know?”

“Pumpkin I  _ tried _ to find out for you the last time you asked.”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway, I just told him about you instead. He thinks it’s really cool that you take care of an entire ship.”

“With help.”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s going on with you anyway?”

The question caught Leonard off guard. He may not have been able to read her surface thoughts and feelings during all of their phone calls, but he knew what sort of questions she usually asked. He knew this one meant that Joanna had heard something. 

“Oh, I’m alright.”

“Mom said you got hurt.”

Bingo. Leonard took a deep breath. He hadn’t really thought of a kid-friendly way to explain what had happened. Or an adult-friendly way, for that matter. 

“I didn’t really get hurt, Jo, I just got a migraine and it’s messed with my psionic sense.”

“Oh.” She paused for a second. “Can that happen to me?”

“No, you don’t need to worry about it happening to you. It was a space thing.”

“Well, what if  _ I _ want to go into space, too.”

He couldn’t help but smile again, at that. Jocelyn had warned him that this was coming, the last time he visited them. 

“Well,” he said, “if  _ you _ want to go into space then you should find a better way to break it to your old man. And maybe if you threw in an _ ‘I love you’ _ he’d even call his friend from the Academy who lives in Atlanta and could tutor you for the entrance exams.”

“Wait, really??”

“Really.”

This time he was sure he could hear her making that goofy smiley sort of face, all the way across the star system. 

“Okay, but are you really doing fine, dad,” she asked again. The persistence reminded him of Jocelyn. Most people who knew Leonard knew not to press him. Except, apparently, the handful of people who loved him enough. 

“I’m fine, sweet pea. I’ll just be feeling weird until my senses come back.”

“Well, alright,” she said, and that actually made her sound like her father. 

She dropped the topic after that. Leonard was grateful when the conversation turned to things like painting the walls of her bedroom and hanging out with her friends and some very teenage complaints about authority figures. He knew he had just held back a lot of information, something that he might regret later, but what was he supposed to do? Terrify his daughter with the news that he might never be able to use his psionic sense again and he might never know why? Someone might accuse him of sugarcoating, but she really didn’t need to know that. 

When the call ended and Leonard turned off his computer he immediately felt alone, in a way that almost scared him. It didn’t make any damn sense, that suddenly being alone felt worse than it used to. It was only around others--with the crew, with Jim, with Spock--that Leonard could actually tell something was missing, but something must have changed, too, in his head, about being alone. He didn’t want to know what it was. He didn’t want to have to adjust to it. 

He turned his computer back on and called Lightfoot, down in the labs. 

“Doctor McCoy,” she said when she answered, and her tone of voice made it clear that she wasn’t prepared for a call with him. 

“Hey, Lieutenant. I just wanted to check and see if you were able to get in touch with the scientists on Betazed.”

She took a deep breath. So that meant bad news. 

“...I did.”

“And?”

“I’m really sorry, Doctor. They said they’ve never heard of something like this happening to a Betazoid.”

“Oh.”

She continued, almost talking over him. “They even sent me their records but they’re right, there’s nothing. Betazoids haven’t done enough space travel to know what sort of disturbance could cause a weakened psionic sense. I can send you what they sent me, if you want.”

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“Before you hang up, there was one more thing.”

“Shoot.”

“They said you can come to Betazed and be treated there. There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to help, of course, but the offer is open.”

Leonard propped his elbows up on his desk, and covered his face with his hands. 

“Doctor? Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” he said through his fingers, “I’m fine. Thanks for checking. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’m sorry, again.”

“Don’t worry about it, you’re doing everything you can.”

He ended the call, feeling grateful that he’d come to his own quarters today for these calls. Grateful that Spock wasn’t here to react to another round of bad news, where he’d have to try to make Leonard feel better when both of them suffered from this. And the two of them would play that game of mirrors again, comforting each other back and forth until it got all mixed up and Leonard would start to forget how he’s supposed to feel about it all. 

“Computer, lights ten percent.”

The lights dimmed around him, leaving just the blue glow from his computer screen filtering in through his fingers. He scrubbed his face with his hands and straightened up, looked at his desk, at everything bathed in blue light. He never came in here anymore, he’d forgotten about most of it. He slid his hand across the surface and sent half of the things on his desk to the floor, feeling satisfied when something broke, loudly. It might have been the glass paperweight, a completely useless desk ornament on a ship with no paper. 

It wasn’t the paperweight, though, because he looked to the left and saw it still sitting on the other end of his desk. So he picked it up and threw it. That one broke even louder. It hit the wall and shattered into pieces. 

Leonard got up from his desk, finally, tore his uniform off, and went to bed. He didn’t have much hope left in him, after it had been continually taken away, but he did hope that if he went to bed now he’d at least wake up in the morning with some sort of idea of how to carry on like this that didn’t involve breaking things. Breaking things would be a bad coping mechanism, considering that other than the useless shit on top of his desk, he’d run out of disposable items pretty fast and have to turn to valuables. Things that other people would have to come in and fix. 

He didn’t know how much time passed just lying in bed like that, in the semi-darkness with the glow of his computer screen still creeping into the bedroom. That was the other thing, about living like this. His brain used to work ten times harder on a given day, shielding and projecting and handling the  _ feelings _ of his patients, as well as their injuries. And he was used to putting in that much effort, accustomed to a certain level of mental exhaustion every night when he went to sleep. Now it felt like his brain hardly worked at all throughout the day. 

Even dealing with his own stewing emotions hardly took any energy. As bad as they got throughout the day, they always seemed small, on their own inside his head. His brain hardly spent any energy on them, which left him wide awake half the night, every night. 

That was another reason he was glad he wasn’t in Spock’s quarters. Lying awake next to him was functionally the same as lying awake alone, it just carried all this guilt and resentment with it. In here he could be miserable and angry and pathetic and he didn’t have to worry about what Spock was feeling, or what he would say if he knew what was going on in Leonard’s head, or how much longer they could carry on like this. He could just be. 

He just wished it didn’t feel like this.

-

Spock  _ did _ show up to his quarters, at some point. It could have been just a short time after Leonard angrily put himself to bed, or it could’ve been hours. He felt strung out and wide awake the whole night anyway. Spock must have put in the code for the door himself, rather than ringing the bell, and came into the bedroom without calling out his name or looking around, like he knew that was where Leonard would be. 

Spock sat on the edge of the bed, clearly trying not to take up space. Or maybe he was really that afraid of the thought of touching him on accident. Leonard rubbed his eyes and pushed himself up to a seat against the headboard.

“What’s up,” he asked, and felt like an idiot. He couldn’t remember how he used to talk to Spock, but nothing that came out of his mouth anymore sounded right. 

“I was in the lab, during your call with the Lieutenant. You sounded upset.”

“Could tell that from my voice, could you?” 

Spock flinched almost imperceptibly. His shoulders got tighter and he blinked his eyes and shifted on the bed. Even when he stopped moving, his posture stayed tense like that. 

“Even without our mental link, Leonard, I have known you for years.”

Leonard sighed. He tried to be less accusatory when he asked, “What are we, without it? Things haven’t been the same, I know you’re smart enough to notice.”

Yeah, he fucked that one up too. He wanted to flop back against the bed after that last part came out, and that was before he saw Spock’s expression get tighter in response. He was basically glaring at this point. 

“I have also noticed that  _ you _ have been isolating yourself from me, as you always do when you are in pain.”

Leonard curled his hand into the sheets to hold himself back from doing something worse, like yelling. 

“You expect me to do anything else when you refuse to touch me? You can’t even be near me since I lost it, even when we’re in the same room. Is that supposed to be encouraging?”

“Since the morning you woke up without your psionic sense you have avoided being in a room with me altogether.”

“Why do you think that is, Spock,” Leonard demanded, “Tell me why I do that, if you know me so well.”

Spock took a deep breath. Probably also trying to hold himself back. He tried again in a softer voice, “If you would allow me to provide reassurance--”

“Oh because you’re so good at that--”

“If you would  _ allow me _ \--”

“You’re not going to fix it, Spock!” 

Spock actually flinched, now. Visibly. Leonard tried to take a complete breath before his next words, so they didn’t come out like that again. 

“This isn’t like when you were teaching me how to use my sense, okay,” he said, looking down at the covers. He loosened his grip on the sheets and stretched out his fingers. “You don’t get to be my savior this time. No amount of you sitting with me and saying nice words is going to bring back what we lost. It’s gone. You can’t fix it.”

Spock was quiet for a long time. The tension around them had built so gradually that Leonard didn’t notice until he was choking on it. If he’d been able to feel Spock’s emotions it would’ve been much worse, but already it was bad enough to make Leonard finally start to feel tired. 

“I am not trying to fix it,” Spock said.

“You are.”

Leonard looked up. Spock was hurt by this conversation, he could tell, and in some cruel corner of his mind he felt satisfied by that, like when he’d pushed all of his things off of his desk and heard something shatter. Satisfied that someone else was finally realizing what Leonard had had to come to terms with all by himself. The rest of what he felt was guilt. 

Spock hadn’t asked for this. Not just the loss of their mental link--but everything he’d had to put up with since then. Leonard getting distant, isolating himself, lashing out in anger. He really was just trying to help, and he didn’t do everything right but it wasn’t like he _ knew  _ what to do in this situation. This thing that had never happened to any of them before. Leonard rubbed his eyes again, breathing out and feeling his shoulders loosen. 

“I’m sorry, that was harsh.”

“Do you want to be alone, tonight?” Spock asked. Maybe Leonard was still being unreasonable, but he felt like Spock should have apologized in return. He wanted Spock to apologize for not being able to fix it, and for trying to anyway, for always sitting like that, tense and far away so he didn’t have to touch him--for letting Leonard build a wall around himself when he _ knew _ what he was doing. He wanted Spock to say sorry and then stop trying to make things better altogether, and just get in the damn bed with him and hold him even though it wouldn’t feel the same. He wanted to hear Spock say that it was okay, even if things didn’t feel the same. 

“Yeah,” he said instead, “I want to sleep alone.”

“Very well.”

Spock stood up, but it didn’t make a difference if he was there on the edge of the bed or not. Leonard had been alone in this bed the entire time. 

“Computer, lights off,” he said once Spock was gone, but that damn blue screen in the other room was still on and shining through the doorway. He turned over and pulled a pillow over his head. That was another thing he always used to do, when he was little and there were too many people around. For some reason all these habits waited to come out until he would never need them again. 

-

Leonard slept in his own quarters from then on. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy valentines day this is where they (start to) get their shit together alright

In just a few weeks they had gone from always knowing what was in each other’s heads to stewing in miscommunication. Both Leonard and Spock just went everywhere with their own personal clouds of tension, now, surrounding them and making the rest of the crew wary of coming near either one of them, and when they were in the same room together it only multiplied. 

Leonard was mad at Spock. He was mad at himself. He was mad, and he couldn’t even let it out because everyone was already walking on eggshells around him for an entirely different reason. He tried to compensate and ended up being unusually polite, which just reinforced the whole eggshells thing. And Jim knew what was going on between him and Spock; Spock had probably told him. He did some compensating of his own, showing up to Leonard’s quarters to pretend he just wanted to  _ hang out _ and  _ vent _ but what he was really doing was making sure Leonard was eating, and sticking his nose around every corner of his quarters to see if he’d gotten destructive again. He was probably taking updates back to Spock. 

“Are you just forcing yourself into my company so you can tell Spock how I’m doing,” he finally asked one night, after Jim showed up to his quarters straight after work. They were sitting on the couch with a holo on, and Jim’s legs stretched out over Leonard’s lap. He did that, when he was trying to be both supportive and subtle. Physical contact that he could pass off as him just being annoying. It was his version of hugging when he didn’t think the other person would say yes to a hug. 

Leonard expected Jim to recoil, but he didn’t. He just looked away from the screen and studied Leonard’s face for a second. 

“Not really. He asks me about you though.”

“He could ask me himself,” Leonard muttered. 

“Right now I really don’t think that  _ he  _ thinks he can.”

“We don’t need you to be some sort of mediator.”

“It’s called friendship, Bones. I’m friends with you and I’m friends with Spock. Of course you come up in conversation.”

Leonard looked back to the screen, even though he’d been ignoring this holo half of the time anyway. Regular life felt too much like watching a holovid, hearing people’s voices and seeing their faces and not feeling any of their emotions layered on top. He still hadn’t gotten used to it after more than a month.

“I’ve been showing up all the time because you’re acting like a sad bastard. And you don’t have to look at me--because you keep avoiding that for some reason--but at some point you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you aren’t alone because I’ve been here giving you evidence of that. And because, and I said this before, I’m your friend.”

“I’m allowed to be a sad bastard in my own damn quarters after pretending to be fine all day.”

“I didn’t say you _ can’t _ be a sad bastard. You don’t even have to pretend to be fine all day.”

Leonard sighed. It must have seemed easy to Jim. Or simple, was maybe a better word. Like getting over a broken heart. Be sad until you don’t feel sad anymore. 

To him it felt more like someone--something--had died. He wasn’t going to just stop being upset over it from one day to the next. Every single day of his life would be different now because of this, and he would never be able to forget about it. But he didn’t need to tell Jim that. The only good it would do would be to make Jim even more attached to his hip than he already was. Nobody was going to be able to fix it. Not Jim, not Spock, not anyone on the ship. Even the scientists on Betazed had no idea what could have happened to him. 

“You hungry?” he asked instead, and Jim grinned and all but jumped off of the couch towards the replicator. 

-

Nothing seemed to change, for a while. Maybe that meant Leonard had adjusted, even though the thought of having a  _ new normal _ made him sick. His new normal, if he had one, included working extra hours in Sickbay whenever possible, putting up with Jim in his quarters almost every night, and sometimes seeing Spock in the turbolift or on the bridge or in the mess if Jim managed to get them all at the same table together. They hardly spoke when they did see each other, which irritated Leonard to no end, which made him not want to talk to Spock at all. It was a cycle. 

A lot of the things he used to do for the sole purpose of seeing Spock multiple times during the workday, like going up to the bridge for no reason or seeing them off in the transporter room for away missions, he stopped doing. If anything important happened, word would eventually get around to Sickbay. 

This time the word came in the form of all four members of the away team, Jim, Spock, Chekov, and Rand, being rushed into Sickbay, all of them looking half-conscious as they were deposited onto biobeds by multiple security and medical officers. Leonard’s heart flipped over, at the sight, but he quickly forced himself to get to work. 

None of them were able to speak, and Chekov looked like he might have been seizing, so he did a full scan as fast as he could just to figure out which sort of sedative he could put them on. Once they were all sedated and didn’t have that pained, disoriented look on their faces he could actually find what was wrong with them. He had all of the beds run diagnostics and went from patient to patient. 

“I think they inhaled something,” Christine said while they stood over Jim. “I found irritation in everyone’s nasal cavities. It’s not poisonous, or else they’d be dead already, I think it’s just making them sick.”

“Good thinking. We should close up the biobeds and do a few cycles of air reprocessing, see if that helps their vitals. What do we know about that planet?”

“I’ve got two of the nurses on that, hopefully they’ll be back soon with a list of native toxins.”

Leonard thought back to the words  _ or else they’d be dead already _ , delivered in Christine’s offhand sort of tone. He’d missed the severity of that at first. He dragged a hand down his face, held the edge of his chin for a moment. 

“Give Spock an extra cycle, the Vulcan respiratory system is more intricate than ours.”

“Will do.”

Christine started with Jim, setting the controls on his biobed to close up around him and start purifying the air in cycles. He looked alive but unwell, sleeping with a harsh expression on his face like he was having a bad dream. But he’d be better soon. Leonard turned around, only to see Spock, in his own biobed, with his eyes cracked open. 

Seeing him there, sick, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes, Leonard forgot that he’d been mad at Spock for the past few weeks. He forgot what the  _ point  _ of being mad at him could even be. 

“Didn’t I sedate you,” he asked quietly. 

“One...of the nurses…” Spock said, managing a few words on the end of each breath. “...unfamiliar with my...needs…”

Leonard held up his hand before Spock said any more. “Alright, cut that out, you’ve been inhaling something that we need to clear out of you and talking’s gonna make it worse.”

Before Leonard set the biobed to close around him he reached for another hypospray and set it to actually help Spock sleep. He made a mental note to give some clearer instructions about caring for Vulcan patients from now on. 

He pressed it into the side of Spock’s neck and allowed his fingertips to linger there, on his skin, for just a moment. Spock was still looking up at him, tired and struggling to breathe, and even though Leonard couldn’t feel it like he once could, he was able to watch as the sedative eased his pain, and slowly sent him off to sleep. It broke his heart, to be in this moment, knowing what he’d been doing leading up to this. Knowing the fact that what happened to them during this away mission could have been much, much worse. He set the controls on the biobed, even though it meant he had to move his hand away from Spock. 

It could have been worse. Spock could have died. 

Leonard sat in his office afterwards, after they’d figured out the gas they’d inhaled and gave the four of them an extra hypospray to counteract the effects and left them to sleep it off. He sat at his desk with his head in his hands and realized that he couldn’t go on like this. Something needed to change. It probably needed to start with an apology.

-

Spock apparently came to an entirely different conclusion. 

“Do not apologize to me.”

“What are you talking about,” Leonard asked. He’d assumed he was doing the right thing, when Spock was discharged from Sickbay and showed up at his quarters a few hours later. He’d already decided that apologizing was the right thing to do as soon as they saw each other again. 

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Spock said. His voice was still a little bit rough, like he’d been choking earlier. “I have been selfish.” 

“No, Spock--”

“Do not interrupt me,” he snapped, and Leonard almost flinched. He’d looked normal enough when Leonard had answered the door. It was like being apologized to had set him off. 

“I have spent the last six weeks focused on my own feelings, and I went so far as to encourage you to prioritize my feelings as well, at the precise moment when I should have been providing you comfort.”

“You were just being honest.”

“No. That does not excuse my behavior. I was allowed to have my own emotions regarding your situation, but I shouldn’t have let it distract us from the fact that what has happened, has happened to you. Not to me.”

“Spock…”

“This is your pain, Leonard. You are the one suffering a loss. At no point have you been given the space to grieve the loss of your sense because we have all allowed you to continue to care for us instead.”

Leonard didn’t know what to say to that. His mouth felt dry. 

“It is okay to stop. Of everyone on the ship, you are the person who needs to be cared for.”

“So what,” Leonard said, and his next words really were meant to be sarcastic, but his voice cracked and started shaking a little bit and he just sounded desperate when he asked, “did you come here to hold me while I cry?”

“If that is what you need.” Spock looked into his eyes. “I came here for you.”

Without shying away this time, without moving slowly, like he didn’t know what was going to happen, without avoiding touch altogether because of how it felt different now, Spock raised both of his hands and held the sides of Leonard’s face, unafraid to discover again that their mental link was gone. 

Spock repeated himself, with so much intensity in every word that Leonard heard his voice as if it was inside of his own head. “ _ This is your pain. _ ”

Leonard closed his eyes, feeling at once how tired he was, how tired he’d been this entire time. He snaked his own hands up to hold Spock’s wrists. That was always the first place they touched each other, when things were hard. That was where it had started for them. Leonard knew he would feel nothing, this time, only the warmth of Spock’s skin and the hem of his shirtsleeve. He didn’t feel the sincerity, the depth of emotion that he knew sat behind those words. He didn’t feel Spock’s love for him, even though he knew it was there. He had to just accept that, along with everything else. Leonard would never  _ know _ things in the way that he’d been able to  _ feel _ them, and even when he got used to life without his psionic sense, that was the reality he’d really been avoiding. 

That he might never feel love in the way he’d  _ felt _ love, before he lost that part of himself that knew how. 

Leonard tried to breathe, and it rattled all the way through his chest, and the next thing he knew he was being pulled forward into Spock’s arms. The two of them held onto each other tighter than they ever had before. They both needed this, he realized, feeling the way Spock hid his face into the curve between his neck and shoulder. And he realized too, after a while, that Spock’s arms around him felt so tight because his body was shaking uncontrollably, and that his breath was rattling like that because he was crying. 


	5. Chapter 5

If Leonard had to spend one more night in his quarters with Jim inviting himself over he was going to scream. So he invited him for a drink on the observation deck instead. 

“You ate before this, right?”

“Do you know how fucking bizarre it is for you to worry about my eating,” Leonard asked in response. Jim just smiled. There was something more playful in his eyes. Spock must have told him that they’d talked without fighting a couple days ago.

“Spock told me you guys have been able to talk,” he said, and his expression was normal but his voice was layered with caution. 

It was comforting to find that Leonard still knew everything that was going on in Jim’s head even without the use of his psionic sense. Even though this realization was coming to him as Jim attempted to be his goddamn relationship counselor. 

“It’s not like one conversation fixed everything.”

It hadn’t. Leonard had been able to let go, back there. He knew it was a good thing. And he’d slept, really slept, for the first time in weeks and he’d woken up to Spock still next to him, but it didn’t make everything right again. It was still awkward, when he and Spock spoke to each other in the morning. Everything they said to each other felt like it was cut and pasted from a different conversation, they just couldn’t seem to understand how the other was feeling. And it made it worse, that this happened after they had finally felt connected again the night before. Leonard had hugged him, quickly, before they parted ways in the corridor, and when he pulled away the look on Spock’s face was something like...shock, and it only made him think that he shouldn’t have done it. 

So, no, things weren’t back to normal now. Maybe they were better, in the grand scheme of things, but Leonard was still sleeping alone. 

“Well, both you and Spock look slightly less miserable, so it sounds like you at least slightly made progress.”

Leonard sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Yeah, something like that. Can we talk about anything else?”

It was quiet for a moment, while they sat there at the bar and the stars raced past them outside the windows. Leonard pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He was sleeping bad again. Come to think of it, he’d been sleeping bad the entire time, with one exception that came and went. 

“Remember when Ruth Lopez poured three cups of coffee down my uniform in front of half of the freshman class and everyone heard about it within minutes so I hid my uniform on campus and spent the rest of the day in your clinic scrubs?”

Against his better judgement, and the fact that that day had been kind of traumatic for Jim, Leonard felt himself smiling. He lowered his hands. “Why’d she do that, again?”

“That’s not important. I got a message from someone at Starfleet Academy that one of my cadet uniforms with unidentified staining has been found by a professor.”

Leonard had had to pull his lower lip into his mouth to keep from looking too entertained. “Where’d you put that thing, anyway?”

“There’s a loose ceiling tile in the faculty bathroom outside the dining hall. I forgot to go back for it.”

“Tell me it didn’t--”

“Right onto his head,” Jim said, nodded solemnly, and then broke out into a smile. Like his coffee-stained uniform coming back to haunt someone years after the fact somehow served as vengeance for Ruth Lopez. 

“Do they know how valuable that thing is? You should go back there and sign it, so they can auction it off.”

Jim snorted. “If anyone’s gonna sign it it should be Ruth.”

“Wait,  _ why _ did she pour three cups off coffee down your uniform?”

“Are you really gonna make me relive this whole thing again?”

-

Leonard relayed the story to Spock when they got breakfast together the next morning. He hadn’t been planning on it, but then their second bit of awkward silence went on for so long that it popped into his mind as a last resort. Spock looked intrigued by the whole thing, especially considering that--although he denied it nowadays--he’d very much hated Jim when they knew each other at the Academy. 

At the end of the story he looked thoughtful, and then asked one single follow up question. 

“Did she have all three cups of coffee on hand, or did she go back to the counter twice to refill the same cup?”

God, he hadn’t even thought about that. He leaned back into his chair and slipped his hand over his mouth and laughed. Spock was watching him, with a sort of lightness in his face and his eyes, and Leonard felt warm, almost in the way he used to feel warm when Spock made him laugh. Close, almost, but not quite. The way he felt everything, now. He tried to enjoy it, for what it was. 

“I don’t think we spoke to each other once, back then.”

Spock took a slow sip of his tea. He was watching Leonard like he was waiting for something, waiting for him to remember the answer. Finally he said, “We did.”

Leonard tilted his head to the side, trying to remember. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Alright,” he said, “I don’t remember.”

He set his mug gently on the table and said in an equally relaxed voice, “You came to my office to threaten me.”

“I did what.”

“After the first time Jim failed the Kobayashi Maru and I gave him feedback, you were waiting outside of my office the next morning when I arrived and you told me that the statements I made about his father were unforgivable, and that either I could go fuck myself, or you were going to kill me.”

Leonard felt his face heating up. He stared down at the table. Half of his shock was from this interaction which he couldn’t even remember, and the other half was from hearing Spock say  _ I could go fuck myself _ in an entirely objective voice. 

“Waiting outside of your office,” he said quietly to himself, and then it clicked. “Oh, god, I must have just gotten off a clinic shift.”

“Before you apologize, I’ve come to believe you were right.”

Leonard looked up at him. Spock was completely serious. 

“Although perhaps too loud to have convinced me at the time,” he added. 

He felt his face slowly break out into a smile. 

-

The first few times Jim had called actual meetings to talk about Leonard’s condition and his test results and the work being done, it hadn’t seemed entirely useless, but that was before the last meeting which lasted all of five minutes, with everyone going around the table and saying they had nothing. This meeting, called for no reason three weeks later, was  _ definitely _ entirely useless. Leonard just sat there the whole time with his chin propped up on his hand. At the very least, he did share a somewhat knowing look with Spock. They hadn’t shared one of those in a while. 

Christine reported on Leonard’s health, which was fine thank you very much, and unchanged since the last time they had one of these little meetings. She finished and Jim moved his interrogation in the direction of Lieutenant Lightfoot, who also had nothing new to report. Except she kept glancing at Leonard while she talked. 

Leonard was thinking about sorting all of the crew into categories, now that he didn’t have his psionic sense: difficult to read, easy to read, and  _ are you kidding me _ . Both Jim and Lightfoot were going into that last one. 

“Why do you two keep looking at each other, is there something you’re not telling me.”

“I wanted it to be up to him,” she said, and Leonard exhaled through his teeth. “I assumed it was personal.”

Yep. He’d just been told on. 

“What,” Jim said, and leaned over the conference table on his hands to look at him. “What’s personal. What is it.”

“There  _ is _ something we haven’t tried.” Leonard pushed his hair back from his forehead. He knew, by this point, that he’d been avoiding the conversation--and even the thought of  _ starting  _ the conversation--because he was just plain afraid of what he didn’t know. Afraid of being under even more study, and scrutiny, and pairs of eyes, only for nothing to come out of that either. But there was nothing good coming out of anywhere else. If there was a milestone titled _ Out of Options _ they’d passed it already. He just needed to suck it up. So he did. 

“I could go to Betazed. I had Lightfoot get in contact with their scientists a while ago and they sent a formal invitation for me to stay there and see if they can figure out what’s wrong.”

Jim stared at him for what felt like an entire minute. 

“Everyone out,” he said, without looking away, and added, “Please.”

Leonard waited until they were all gone, and then stood up out of his own chair. At the very least he wasn’t going to be talked down to. 

“When were you going to tell me this?” he asked. Demanded. He was angry. If Leonard’s psionic sense was still with him, he’d be able to feel Jim’s anger seeping out of him like smoke. 

“When it seemed like a good idea.”

“ _ When it seemed like a good idea, _ ” he mocked, “You are so impossible.”

“I know our schedule, Jim, we’ve got the entire year ahead of us already sectioned off, and some of those stops are full of people relying on us getting there on time, I wasn’t about to--”

“Stop. Just stop.” Jim held up his hand. He was using his Captain voice now. “I know you thought you were doing this out of the good of everyone else, but that’s not how this works. You're the CMO of this ship. Everyone’s wellbeing is connected to  _ your _ wellbeing.”

Leonard sighed. 

“What if it was me we were talking about?” Jim asked, and he lowered his voice once it started to shake. Leonard looked up and it became clear, then, that this was killing him. Jim’s eyes were shining like if he raised his voice too much again he’d break into tears. 

Somehow, this time it didn’t make Leonard feel guilty and stressed out, to see someone be upset over what he was going through. Because it wasn’t that Leonard’s problem was  _ hurting _ Jim, it was that Leonard’s own pain, and the shitty way he dealt with it, was so difficult for him to watch. 

“What if it was Spock?” he asked next. 

Leonard had to look away again. 

“Or  _ anyone _ on this ship? Do you know who would be the one in my ear demanding that we set a course to get them help?”

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

“Don’t apologize to me. The only thing you can do for me is go to Betazed and get help. I’m putting us on course tonight.”

-

A week later, things had significantly cooled down, and they’d be at Betazed in the morning, and Leonard couldn’t sleep. The sleeplessness bothered him more than it usually did, because it wasn’t that his mind didn’t feel tired enough. He was cold, and his bed was too big. He felt alone. Maybe even afraid. 

So he went to Spock’s quarters. 

The sound of the door didn’t seem to wake him up. For a moment he lingered in the doorway to Spock’s bedroom, saw him sleeping there and wondered where this conversation would actually go. If it would make him feel better, to wake Spock up in the middle of the night and tell him he was nervous. Maybe it’d turn out like so many attempts before it, and they’d be speaking to each other through a hundred invisible barriers and just end up misunderstanding one another before sleeping in separate rooms again. Then he remembered how pissed Jim had been about Leonard making his mind up about what someone else thought, without actually including them. He needed to stop doing that. 

He settled into bed next to Spock, and the shifting of the mattress was enough to make him hum and turn over. His breath deepened. There was just enough light in the room, from the stars outside the windows. Leonard watched as he slowly woke up. 

“Leonard,” he said in a quiet voice, rough around the edges, before he even opened his eyes. And then Spock reached out, still half asleep, and found Leonard’s arm, felt along his skin until he could clasp their hands together. It made the breath catch in his throat. He didn’t know what to say anymore. 

“Are you alright?” Spock asked. 

His eyes slowly opened. Leonard shook his head no, against the pillows. 

“You are worried about going to Betazed.”

Leonard nodded. Spock pulled their hands closer to himself, his breath ghosting over their knuckles. He was thinking. Or trying to, considering he’d just been asleep a few seconds ago. Leonard helped him out. 

“I guess I’m just afraid they won’t be able to help me either. Then it’d really be hopeless.”

“I thought you were without hope.”

“Shut up,” Leonard said, and felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Nobody’s ever without hope, you’ve quoted that Shakespeare line to me enough times for me to accept that.”

“Then no matter what happens on Betazed, we will not lose hope.”

Leonard felt something break open, in his chest, and spill over onto the sheets. He didn’t stop the next thing that came out of his mouth. 

“Will you come with me?”

Spock’s eyes widened in the darkness. It was a lot to ask, even if the two of them were technically still in a serious relationship. Leonard could be there for weeks or more, and Spock was the First Officer of the ship. This was the sort of question Leonard should have asked weeks ago, even days ago, even-- _ shit _ \--at least the day before they’d get there? 

And yet, Spock didn’t even hesitate before he answered. 

“Of course, ashayam. Anything.”


End file.
